Do you attend church?

I don't. Moving beyond my problems with Christianity, I have no desire to set foot in these humanist-influenced churches that have more in common with a social gathering than with a reverent institution. I don't want my worship interrupted with attempts to guilt me into giving money to people supposedly trying to help starving homosexual minorities in Africa. Or whatever it is they do.

I've been meaning to hang out at a local Catholic church, "after hours" for months. I want a place to sit and meditate that "feels" holy. All other churches round these parts are drab and industrial, odd for a suburb.

European churches are mostly real solid-stone engineering/artistic marvels. You can't help but notice the care and expense lavished upon them when they were new. Very few north american churches can compare. In fact, I saw a 'church' recently here in Canada, that was a modular steel warehouse hosting a furniture store, before changing hands. Hard to feel spiritually meditative inside a warehouse.

European churches are mostly real solid-stone engineering/artistic marvels. You can't help but notice the care and expense lavished upon them when they were new. Very few north american churches can compare. In fact, I saw a 'church' recently here in Canada, that was a modular steel warehouse hosting a furniture store, before changing hands. Hard to feel spiritually meditative inside a warehouse.

That's the jest of my experience. I live about an hour between two major cities which everyone knows and sadly enough that's where your architecture is. I do what I can to avoid those places. I hear they have Buddhist temples in LA, can't imagine tranquility is found amidst the roar of traffic and cursing.

I believe Christianity must be renovated, since deposing it would play into the hands of those who wish to decompose this society further.

Here are my problems with contemporary churches:

1. The dress code is not formal enough. This is not an activity dedicated to the self, like shopping or getting coffee. It is worship, where you leave the self behind.2. Crowdism. If you object to the humanism, pity-the-meek, etc. attitudes toward church, this is their origin. It's external to the religion itself, which is widely misinterpreted.3. Anti-realism/Dualism. This has always been my primary and enduring problem with Christianity, religion, liberalism and socialization. They're based on the idea that nature and reality are bad, and the only solution is a human order, composed of the wishful desires of the individual as applied by a group of mutually tolerant people using each other to achieve the appearance of consensus on this issue.4. Not enough nature in general. Here is where the Satanists, Druids and Pagans have my vote. Metaphors about sheep and lions always seem to favor the sheep, because that's popular and manipulating people is how you achieve "success" in a herd.5. Not enough classical culture. In classical culture, all is in balance and harmony, with a sense of divine order pervading every aspect of reality. In modern religion, we instead have the Revolutionary mentality, where everything is out of order and we must correct it with social engineering.6. The music is bad, as others have mentioned. No Russian composers for me, either. Bring on the Germans and Danes, and for the Baroque, the Italians.

Where others can follow this path, I don't particularly care what religious category they apply to themselves. What I care about is whether they are able to live according to this channel of behavior and thought (the latter creates the former) and not import the insanity of a world dedicated to the tangible and immediate as a form of the absolute, which is the traditional way that humans deny mortality, meaning and anything else bigger than themselves. It's a means of suppressing things that frighten us instead of finding the good in them.

I don't want my worship interrupted with attempts to guilt me into giving money to people supposedly trying to help starving homosexual minorities in Africa.

Which churches support homosexual minorities in Africa?

American Episcopals, seeker sensitives, half of mega churches, some Southern Baptists even. In the UK, most Anglican churches and probably all Presbytarian churches. People dont notice and think churches are all about hatey preachy stuff but that is because no one goes! If they went they would realize it has been decades since these churches hollowed themselves out to attract those very people that dont go.

Hmm. It's very interesting that someone mentions going to a Catholic church in between services just to be in the building. There is actually a pretty nice church in my little city in the middle of the Midwest US that has me wanting to do the same thing.

I took an architecture drawing class in "high school" (which I didn't really attend) that didn't teach me a damn thing about architecture older than Colonial homes, but it did make me look harder at the features and designs of other buildings, curches and cathedrals particularly. Though I don't know much about the history or technical side of the design, there has always been some aspect of the orirntation of that sort of architecture that really drew me in, almost in a spitirual sense (if I can use that term to the loosest allowable degree). I think it has to do with the large, high-ceiling open spaces, along with the emphasis on sturcture that draws the eye from the ground upward, where features meet and synthesize in beautiful arches, butresses, clovers, domes, and ultimately, the cross. Not able to explain way, I just accept that the geometry and dimensions touch some very profound cog in my psyche, and compell me to create and worship.

This coming from one of those post-anti-Xtian raised-in-a-conservative-religious-home ex-Satanist kind of guys (you know the type).

Not to mention the positively *astounding* acoustics present in those immense rooms. To hear a pipe organ fill a church with its buzzing, warbling sound is a really majestic experience. I would love to drag my amp in there, crank that fucker up to 11, and slash away all downtuned and ominous riffs. Has there ever been a death metal album recorded in a cathedral? I can understand why if not, but at the same time, I don't see why not!